Top 15 Wole Soyinka Quotes

Ours is a strong breed my son. It is only a strong breed that can take this boat to the river year after year and wax stronger on it. I have taken down each year’s evils for over twenty years. I hoped you would follow me.

Surely it is too much to ask a man to give up his own soil.

A village which cannot produce its own carrier contains no men.

But then I am a woman. I have a woman’s longings and weaknesses.

There is peace in being a stranger.

The very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent.

In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health.

Everyone is linked, all our actions have ramifications, and music is a teacher of this interconnected reality.

...the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations.

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.

There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life.

Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form....

If you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fall-outs that come with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself?

Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective.

For the fire consumes all but the arsonist.